A study of the 1965 film "The War Game" and its relevance a half-century later.
The year to date in cinema as seen by our contributors.
Ow, my brain hurts. So, let's just get these out of the way, shall we? In the annual Village Voice/LA Weekly Film Poll, announced just before Christmas, 94 critics (including me) came up with 160 nominations for best films of 2009 -- and voted in a bunch of other categories, too, including Best Film of the Decade ("Mulholland Dr."). [My decade favorites are here.]
Meanwhile, Film Comment polled another big batch o' crix (a lot of the same ones, in fact) and came up with a somewhat different 20 Best of 2009 list -- and 150 Best Films of the Decade (topped by... "Mulholland Dr."). Just for fun, let us compare the two groups' Top Dozen for both year and decade:
British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, as I've mentioned before, is surely the most accomplished action-thriller director around these days. "Bloody Sunday" and "The Bourne Supremacy" are evidence enough of that. This week, Greengrass's "United 93," about the September 11, 2001, flight now commemorated in a Pennsylvania field, opens the Tribeca Film Festival and then moves into theaters.
David Poland, over at "The Hot Blog," saw the film recently and writes:
Maybe a young director shouldn't expect too much. Peter Watkins made "The War Game," a documentary about nuclear war, and it was banned on British television and described by Kenneth Tynan as the most important film ever made. Then Watkins made his first full-length feature, "Privilege," in which he was just as bitter, in a different way, about how things were going. But the reviewers didn't exactly lose their cool." Watkins said the other day. "You know the kind of review. It's a good try, they say. Interesting. Original. But it doesn't quite come off." Watkins' "The War Game," which has been at the World Playhouse for a month, shows what would happen if a small nuclear device were to explode off-target in England.
Great Movies
